Favorite Public Garden: New Orleans City Park

As a teacher of landscape architecture for a quarter of a century, I had lots of students who’d grown up in New Orleans. And when they spoke about their City Park (as opposed to our City Park here in Baton Rouge) it was almost with reverence, as if they were describing their birthplace or some other almost magical place. I’d never felt that way about a park before, and I envied them. Once I visited the park and learned about its history, I understood how, especially to a child, this was a special place, where so many of life’s rites of passage could have transpired. The park has something to offer people of all ages and from all walks of life, from nature-lovers to art buffs, from horticulturists to golfers, from fitness freaks to meditation practitioners.

The 1300-acre New Orleans City Park near Lake Ponchartrain is one of the largest urban parks in the country and home to the largest collection of mature live oaks in the world, some over six hundred years old. Once the site of a sugar plantation, the first parcel of land for the park was acquired in 1854, making it one of the country’s oldest parks; expansions over the years have brought the park to its present size.

Hurricane Katrina ravaged the park, but because of the place that this open space holds in the hearts of New Orleanians, its rehabilitation was swift. It is hoped that the storm and the park’s ensuing rebirth has brought more public attention to the park’s design legacy from the period of the Works Progress Administration when architects, artists, and craftsmen were put to work on public projects. In the New Orleans Botanic Garden, originally called the City Park Rose Garden (1936), a garden within the park, architect Richard Koch, sculptor Enrique Alférez, and landscape architect William Wiedorn collaborated to create a masterpiece of Art Deco garden art and design. Today, outstanding plant collections complement the Depression-era project’s structures. City Park is one of the best reminders of this period in the city’s artistic history when so many important artists and writers were working in the Crescent City.

Suzanne Turner is professor emeriti of the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at LSU where she taught for almost 25 years. She is now principal of a research and design firm, Suzanne Turner Associates, which specializes in historical and cultural landscapes, and design and planning where meaning and place matter. She is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.